Life Without Shoes
“The reporter has a shoe fetish: while he couldn’t possibly buy up all the shoes in the world, he had gone far in fulfilling his promise to himself by buying enough shoes within his means to obliterate that memory of life without shoes.”
That the reporter would spend the night in detention was clearly settled, nobody was arguing it any longer. It was the process of booking that brought up a little argument. The reporter didn’t mind going into the dungeon without any shred of clothing. But he would have wanted to wear sme shoes, even if nothing better tha a pair of rubber slippers. Eeveryone has his fetish. For many Nigerians, the fetish is in building many houses, for others, it is in buying cars, while some like to buy up all the fanciful silk materials available in the well-appointed boutiques in London, Rome, Paris and New York. The reporter has a shoe fetish. Growing up, he could remember vividly two occasions on which his father made him proud by scrounging around to buy the “congress” shoes at one time, and at another time the “bally” shoes. In those days in Ile-Ife, any kid who couldn’t put on those shoes at the respective times that they were in vogue was just out of the picture. The kid would not be able to get out the few pennies needed at festival times to rent a bicycle to ride out with his friends to visit family friends who obeyed the rituals of giving the youngsters “something” for the festivals. You just had to put on your “congress” or “bally” or you must stay home.
Those shoes stayed around with the reporter for such a long time, even when his feet were getting a little too large for them, and they failed to provide any comfort from the resulting blisters. It was during the period that the reporter made himself the promise that when he grew up, he must buy up all the shoes in all the stores in all the countries in the world. While he couldn’t possibly buy up all the shoes in the world, the reporter had gone far in fulfilling his promise to himself by buying enough shoes within his means to obliterate that memory of life without shoes. And when a month shy of his 36th birthday a police constable told him to pull off his shoes, that “you can’t wear shoes in the cell, lest you kill yourself with them or murder an inmate with them, you must put them off,” an argument, of course, ensued. “I am not a murderer, and I have no intention to kill myself. Do I look to you to be someone depressed simpl because Adewusi wanted a slice of my flesh?” The man just truned his head and continued to write in his ledger the items that had been taken from the journalist: a belt of underwear, a novel, a pen, cigarette lighter and an handherchief.
“Which do you want my handkerchief?”
“You might strangle yourself with it, or strangle an inmate with it.”
The reporter started laughing even as he knew that he had lost the argument. It was clear that the policeman would use force on the reporter if he failed to comply with his ordees to take off the shoes. But once the act was done, the shoes taken off, the floor behind the police counter, covered with sands, did not feel as threatening as the reporter had feared. The first few steps outside, as he picked his way over sharp gravels and broken bottles, provided something of a challenge, and by the time that the reporter had walked the 50 yards or so to the gate of the dungeon, he had made up his mind that he would not allow his shoe fetish to get the better of him. This is war, he told himself, and he must live every difficult moment as though it was the most natural condition possible. Anger, rather than despair, gripped him as he entered the dungeon proper, and he was face to face with the toilet that was the first room he saw a couple of feet inside the dungeon. The stench gripped him, and what he saw made him swear silently.
The toilet has an open doorway separated from the main passage of the dungeon with a six-foot-high step. The floor of the toilet was filled to ankle height with urine on top of which little pellets of defecation swim. It was the ordeal of the thought that, to relieve himself, he would have to wade through that odiousness that turned his stomach, and churned his bile. Of course, he had to go into that puddle barefoot and, of course, he had to walk back onto his blanket barefoot, and stinking and, of course, he had to lie down on that same blanket, enveloped by the memory of the toilet and the stench of the puddle. Sleep is powerful and provides an opium to free the mind of self-pity, a dangerous condition for a man who has lost his freedom. The reporter didn’t understand it, but within 15 minutes of entering the dungeon, sleep came, dreamless, and he slept right to cockcrow around 3.30 a.m. when he was a woken by the combination of the cock’s crow and the feeling of something cold being pressed against his feet. He saw a man crouching at the bottom of the Presidential Lodge at Kalakuta Republic, and he thought for a moment or two that he was dreaming. But then he soon realized he had woken up, and that a live man was spraying something on his feet. “I was spraying burnt Shelltox on your feet,” said the man, a fatherly figure called Mr. Oluwole, Nigerian External Telecommunications’ (NET) chief commercial officer, who has locked up on the suspicion that he might know about how the NECOM House got burnt down.
Mr. Oluwole, who said he was thinking of retiring from NET before he was picked up, had been working with NET for upwards of 30 years. He could never understand why anyone would think that he had the stomach to sit down with anybody and plan to commit arson and to murder a man and a woman. He said he was picked up one morning because h eallowed curiousity to get better of him. The police had come to the NET quarters where he lives with other NET executives when he saw that some of his colleagues were being arrested. He went there, he said, to find out why they were being arrested. The senior police officer in-charge of the action saw him and asked him who he was and what he doing there.
“I am a NET employee, and these people you are arresting are my colleagues at NET.”
“Arrest him,” he recalled hearing the police officer say, as his arrest was ordered. That’s how Mr. Oluwole got to be in the Kalakuta Republic.
When morning came, Benson Out, the acting assistant commissioner of police who was investigating the criminal charges against the reporter, came over to take him to the court. The judge, Mr. Justice F.O Anyaegbunam, did not notice that morning that the reporter was not wearing shoes. The hearing that day centred around the question of the bringing the accused to the court without obtaining consent of the A.G. as the law on Official Secrets Act stipulates. And after a spirited argument by the accused’s lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the judge had no option but to order the release of the reporter as he threw out the whole case as it stood that morning. The reporter would have been re-arrested by the police but for Chief M.K.O. Aiola quickness in writing a note Chief Fawehinmi that he suspected that the police were in the process of re-arresting his editor right there in the court premises. Chief Fawehinmi quickly informed the judge of that evil development. As he was informing the court, the reporter quickly left the court, commandeered Sule Abiola’s car and fled, practically.
©Sunday Concord, March 20, 1983
(Pp.204-207)
